BACKSTORY: I first visited this Mission because it was used in Alfred Hitchcock's classic film "Vertigo." I have returned many times since because it is so beautiful. Of the 21 California Missions this is the sixth to be established under the direction of Father Junipero Serra. Lieutenant José Joaquin Moraga led the group that arrived in this area on June 27, 1776. The Diorama: Created for the 1939 World's Fair on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, it shows what the area looked like around 1791.
BACKSTORY: Edited from the Mision San Francisco de Asís brochure:
The Cemetery: The statue in the center of the garden is of Father Junipero Serra as sculpted by Arthur Putnam, an early California artist. Burials in Mission Dolores Cemetery toook place from the earliest days of the Mission until the 1890's. Originally the Cemetery covered a much larger area. The first grave markers were simple wooden crosses and deterioriated completely with the passage of time. Gradually the Cemetery was consolidatd to its present size. The unidentified bodies were reverently buried in a common grave.
Most of the extant markers designate people who died in the decades following the Gold Rush, when San Francisco was a rapidly growing City which experienced much illness and many early deaths. Many of those who are buried here have given their names to the streets of San Francisco.
Among the notable buried here are Don Luis Antonio Argüello, first governor of Alta California under Mexican rule; Don Francisco de Haro, first Alcalde (mayor) of San Francisco; three vicitms of the Vigilantes: James P. Casey, Charles Cora, and James "Yankee" Sullivan; and a French family killed in the explosion of the steamboat Jenny Lind.
